Zidarov got out, bringing with him an unignited cotin-stick. ‘Hey, friend!’ he called out, expansively. ‘Injector’s gone. Help a citizen out?’

The driver stared at him as if he’d run him over some way back. He looked him up and down. Then he shrugged, and reached inside for an injector. Zidarov came up to him, lit the stick, then grinned.

‘Thanks!’ he said, clapping the man on the shoulder. Then he got back in the Luxer, and drove off. Once a block or two away, he deactivated the cotin – horrible stuff – and checked the feed from the personnel scanner he’d attached to the inside of the groundcar’s door.

After a few glitches, the full holofield emerged atop the column in the Luxer – the ghostly grey-green web of outlines, shimmering within a web of sliding nodes and clusters. He saw the man standing, still smoking. He saw the vehicle idling, the other drivers, the street around it. The light-bend aegis was in full effect, and the scanner-scrambler reported zero pen­etration. Scribo had been as good as his word – it was a nice piece of kit.

Zidarov turned off the feed, setting it to shunt direct into his private storage at the Bastion. He remote-destroyed the detector by the side of the street outside the Terashova mansion. He started the Luxer up again, and headed north, away from the glitz, up to where the massive profiles of the suborbital receiver-cradles filled the rain-drenched horizon.

The suborbitals in the rain were a grisly sight. The massive rockcrete discs stained quickly, their sweeping curves pocked by rust-streaks from the metal rivets and fixings. The big landers churned it all up as they came down, burning up the condensation, turning the air itself into a fog of steam.

Still, on this occasion Zidarov wasn’t heading down to the under-disc shadowlands, but to the control towers. Each receiver-cradle had a cluster of them, rising up like spears on the edge of the great bowls, slender and precarious. They looked like emaciated, skinny old men, peering down into immense cauldrons of burning sulphur, surrounded by plumes of steam and smoke, lost in the haze of noise and movement.

Zidarov made his way to the great entrance maws, and got out. He walked, still at ground level, to the receiving station. He was met by a young man in the uniform of the suborbital port facility – navy blue, tatty at the edges, looking like a cheap knock-off of a Navy captain’s dress gear.

‘His Hand, probator,’ the man said. ‘The supervisor is ready to see you now.’